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Dear Editor,
I am writing in response to Zehra Nabi’s Op/Ed article to “Egg Girl” concerning the closing of the Golden Pears across campus. Since Ms. Nabi admitted in the article to not having used the Golden Pears herself, I feel that perhaps she should have given herself more credibility to write the article by speaking to individuals who do use them before scapegoating a fellow student.
While I was appalled by the fact that a Mount Holyoke student would do something as irresponsible and disgusting as drop a carton of eggs on the floor and leave them to rot, this sort of incident is hardly isolated. All over campus for some reason students either think it is the housekeeper’s responsibility to clean up after them in the Golden Pears (it isn’t) or that Mount Holyoke has a special stipend with which it will fly their mothers out from the farthest reaches of the globe to clean up after them. This also—sadly—is not the case.
Whether you travel here from an hour away, across the country, or across an ocean, as soon as you enter college life you assume certain responsibilities as a member of a larger community. No longer are your parents there to hold your hand like they did in high school and by now you should know how to wash dishes without a dishwasher. The housekeepers are amazing individuals who erase all memory of your gin-soaked Vegas Night activities from the floors and bathrooms of your dorm at six in the morning and do it with a smile; to ask them to scrape your moldy pizza bites out of a crusted pan that has been sitting in a sink since Jojo became President of Mount Holyoke is completely irrational.
Some people do use the Golden Pears as they were intended—they sign up in advance, clean up after themselves, and leave the kitchens spotless. It is not those people to whom this letter is addressed. And it is not the fault of a single person that the kitchens were closed. Believe what you like about the girl who spilled eggs, but the truth is that she was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.
If the Golden Pears are reopened and you choose to cook in them, clean up after yourselves. If you didn’t put the food in the fridge, odds are highly unlikely that it belongs to you—don’t touch it. I will not be here next year to see how this turns out, but I sincerely hope that this situation changes for the better, because we like having the Golden Pears closed about as much as Residential Life likes closing them. And that’s the truth.
Sincerely,
Courtney Lear ‘10
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- Read Between the Lines: Dear Egg Girl
- Letter to the Editor
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- Letter to the Editor
- Letter to the Editor
